Autism and Exhaustion

I was planning to write this post during a short moment of waiting time at my internship today. It was my first day there and it mainly consisted of meetings and  talking to people. I got rudely interrupted though, by another coworker who wanted to talk to me. How dare they! All jokes aside, I ended up talking with a lot of people today, all of which seemed nice. There was a really pleasant atmosphere at the school and it seems like most of the teachers there are friendly. That’s a good sign seeing as I’m about to spend a year there teaching as well.

After I got home, I felt pretty decent, albeit a bit tired. It wasn’t as bad as I expected though so I planned to write up a little post after dinner and then maybe play some games with friends or something. Instead I ate my dinner, went to watch an anime episode and just absolutely crashed. Even writing this I almost feel my head spinning with exhaustion. Turns out that during covid my tiredness after a day of interacting with strangers didn’t magically vanish, who could have predicted that?

I do feel like exhaustion is a part of mental health problems that is often ignored by the people around us. Not so much by choice, but because it’s not all that visible in a daily situation. If my social skills are poor, or I say the wrong thing, or I get a panic attack, that’s something that shows to others. Not always equally well, but it’s somewhat tangible. What they don’t see is what I do when I close my bedroom door and just collapse due to the building exhaustion that all releases at once when you get a moment to rest. 

For me personally, that’s still the biggest problem that my autism causes me. I’ve dealt with worse things in the past, but a lot of that I could learn to deal with over time. The exhaustion just never fully goes away. And I’ll be honest that I underestimated its effect. That’s not saying I didn’t expect it, but after more than a year of not having to really deal with it in this way, I forgot how bad it got. I’m really glad I got to do a lot of those first impressions a week ahead of teaching because I’ll be dead tired tomorrow but I’ll not have any big responsibilities. Even when I’m tired I can do laundry and groceries without much of an issue.

Anyway, I ended up talking about being tired more than about my impressions of the internship. The school was nice, they have a garden area with some animals because they do some animal and nature classes, which is cool. The building looks nice as well, nothing special, but it feels fairly open which I think is nice. The people definitely left an impression. There was a mix of people but also a lot of younger teachers, quite a few even younger than I am. I like that, having more people that are around my age to work with. The person who’ll be in charge of me, since I’m still an intern, was nice too, so all in all today was a big success. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to pass out again. Thanks for reading!